New York- I was doing some writing yesterday about my experiences in Afghanistan and Central Asia in the months after 9/11. Delving into the assassination of Massoud, the death of an Italian colleague, meeting the Taliban, and all of the other random seeming things that led me to be in New York on 9/11 and in Afghanistan shortly thereafter gave me pause to reflect on the constant of time, the merits of what we call progress. In the near future the new WTC will be completed with tourists, wallets bulging with euros (if the euro survives), pounds, yen and yuan, trampling grounds that to me look more reminiscent of Abu Dhabi’s corniche than the considerably less imaginative original twin towers architected by Minoru Yamasaki in 1965.

New York- What began as one horrific day turned into a decade long quest. 9/11 did not change the course of my life, it merely accelerated it at hyper speed. In the weeks before the suicide attacks on New York, I had been studiously laying the groundwork for a photographic journey inside Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. I had hoped to undertake the trip in the spring of 2002 when the first winter snows would begin to melt. The Taliban regime maintained a little known office in a working-class section of New York’s Queens borough. Taped to the front of the ad hoc mission’s cheap wooden door was a sign printed up on computer paper that read: “Mission of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” in English, Pashto, and Dari.

From this non-descript medical building filled with Indian doctor’s offices, two Taliban diplomats shuttled back and forth to the United Nations headquarters in Turtle Bay. Shunned by the majority of the international community when word of their track record on women’s rights or lack thereof and anti-Hazara pogroms became publicized, they tried and failed to win over other nation-state’s representatives to grant them the international recognition they craved. My cold calls to these men were met with great suspicion. They wanted records of what university I attended and a detailed study of my employment history to even consider granting me a tourist visa to their then forgotten backwater that occupied my dreams.

In the interim, I studied up on all the available literature on the group that existed in August of 2001, which was next to nothing. I then happened upon a rather obscure text in the warrens of The Strand, New York’s most famous used bookshop. The book, Taliban: A Shadow Over Afghanistan by a German academic called Burchard Brentjes and his wife Helga, was translated into English and published in Varanasi, India. I scooped up the book, confident it would not be missed by anyone else that August and shuttled it back to Brooklyn. On a balmy evening two days before 9/11, I sat upon the tar papered rooftop of a brownstone row house and excitedly flipped through the text, occasionally glancing up to watch the setting sun radiate off the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on the other side of the East River. I sat in wonderment, thinking about this devastated, landlocked country a half a world away that captivated my imagination since a pair of backpacking visits to its borderlands in Pakistan’s Baluchistan and Northwest Frontier Province (since renamed Khyber-Pakhtunkwha Province) in 1999 and 2000.

Afghanistan under the Taliban was a weak, chaotic place that drew in Salafi-jihadi terrorists from around the globe to its realm ruled by accommodating Deobandi Islamists with a myopic worldview. The relationship between the Taliban and al-Qaeda was a highly transactional, murky one and, at the time, the two entities were considerably less interdependent than many might assume looking back on the era today. That important nuance would matter little when 19 men from four Arab countries would hijack four passenger jets and use two of them to pulverize the densely populated New York icon killing nearly 3000 people. The destruction of the World Trade Center would set the stage for the first decade of the twenty-first century, much of it disastrous. It would transform me from a curious California geography student into a war correspondent. Year after year, I returned to the site of the attack to document the bouts of collective grief and fits of progress. This is my record of a decade of 9/11.

New York- So bin Laden is dead, sunk to the bottom of the Arabian Sea in a weighted body bag. What comes next for al-Qaeda? A lot of assumptions come into play, the foremost of which is that the angry Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri will assume the top position. Analysts seem to think that al-Zawahiri is combative ideologically and lacks any of the charisma of bin Laden. Many would probably like to believe al-Qaeda is a spent force..highly unlikely. Some wonder if it can survive without its leader. Therein lies the debate about whether AQ is a leaderless ideology or a leader-driven cult-esque movement akin to the LTTE. When Prabhakaran was killed on the edge of that lagoon in May of 2009, that was the effective end of the LTTE as a leader-led, mass movement. But it was certainly not the end of Tamil nationalism/separatism (assuredly not in the Tamil diaspora or doubtfully in South India). Al-Qaeda will obviously not fade away overnight but I find it hard to imagine crowds of henna-bearded Islamist protestors in the sweltering streets of Karachi marching around with al-Zawahiri posters. He’s just simply not iconic or photogenic like OBL nor are there loads of great images of him. I remember when I first traveled across Pakistan way back in 1999, people (well men since I don’t recall socializing with women there then) informed me that almost no Pakistanis had ever heard of OBL prior to Bill Clinton’s cruise missile strikes in Khost the summer before. The American attempt against him, in the wake of the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam bombings, is what really propelled him to fame in Pakistan, not any kind of indigenous love for him as I would venture to guess most Americans/Westerners would believe.

President Barack Obama visited Ground Zero/the new World Trade Center site today to quietly lay a wreath on the grounds of the new memorial. I never caught site of the guy but got a few nice snaps. The NYPD officers assigned to the event were fairly relaxed and it ended up being a low key affair compared to the 9/11 anniversaries I’ve covered.

New York- The new tower in what was referred to as “the pit” for so many years in lower Manhattan is steadily rising above the construction fence that surrounds it. I’m still standing by my assessment that the entire complex will not be completed by the close of what what will be mega multi billionaire businessman cum politico Michael Rubens Bloomberg’s twelve years of rule over the city. While the city sleeps (or at least the financial district’s portion of it), One World Trade Center ascends toward the infinite or at least taller than Chicago’s Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower) which surpassed the original twin towers as the world’s tallest building in 1974 after their very brief reign as the world’s tallest in 1972-1973.

New York- After flying over 24 hours (including a brief layover in Kuwait) from Kuala Lumpur to Queens on September 10th, I wound up at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan for yet another 9/11 anniversary. As someone who documented the first anniversary of 9/11 in 2002, after investigating the lives of the Hamburg cell along the Elbe River days before, I never thought that eight years on I would be in Malaysia still investigating 9/11 days before another anniversary of a seemingly unending (yet noticeably dwindling in yearly attendance) mourning centered on the site where architect Minoru Yamasaki’s twin towers, completed in 1971 and 1972, once stood. Whereas the 9/11 memorial service in the first few years was mostly a solemn occasion, now that much of the city has moved on on with itself on a day to day basis, yesterday’s events took on more of a circus atmosphere as masses of mourners have given way to kook conspiracy theorists ranting about this or that and opportunistic operators like Geert Wilders over the Netherlands’ Partij voor de Vrijheid, to make their oft obnoxious voices heard and thugs calling themselves the “English Defence League” who looked like hooligans directing their latent rage at a religious grouping as if it were an opposing football club. Ground Zero has become a magnet for unwelcome guests to spout unlearned nonsense and well-to-do tourists in over-sized sunglasses gawking at the site as if it were a new Apple store, stomping around the city on their strong currencies on guilt-free trans-Atlantic (and now trans-Pacific) shopping sprees, the WTC just one more “must see” on a itinerary outlined in a Guide de Routard. Many of the roots of 9/11 remain shrouded in mystery and what many around the world have failed to accept is that they will remain in obscurity for perhaps the rest of our collective lifetimes. Many of those involved in the planning of 9/11 are kept out of reach by our own (the American) government or continue to successfully hide amongst tribes in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The answers are out there, but we cannot get to them. Frustrating I know, but no a reason to keep perpetuating untruths and youtube diatribes.